


go softly

by doomcountry



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blindness, Consensual Mutilation, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21938557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomcountry/pseuds/doomcountry
Summary: And there is nothing else besides this.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 46
Kudos: 555
Collections: TMA Escaping Beholding Via Eye Trauma Fics





	go softly

**Author's Note:**

> for milly in our jm nation secret santa exchange <333 she wanted martin gently blinding jon. merry christmas my darling!!
> 
> this is the happy au where jon and martin beat elias at his own game before 160 can happen and everyone is fine and nothing is terrible ever again.

Martin brings home a jug of bleach from the shops.

It sits on the kitchen counter next to the white bowl of apples and the electric kettle. Blue cap seal unbroken, label faced away toward the wall. It’s there at Jon’s elbow while he chops vegetables for supper on the wooden cutting board and it’s picked up and then replaced when Martin wipes down the countertop after breakfast. Standing at the sink, washing out their tea mugs with a sponge and looking out at the meadow behind the safe house, where a single distant sheep is placidly eating its way across the base of the hill, Jon can see it from his periphery.

They don’t need to talk about it, because the conversation has already been had. It had spanned two or three days—neither of them really remember its beginning or end now. Two weeks in Scotland before Jon had found the courage to bring up the subject.

It was a relief, really, when they finally sat down to talk about it. An uneasy weight that Jon had been carrying all the way from London finally lifted from his shoulders. And the both of them had cried a little through it, and reached out for one another’s hands, and lain awake beside each other in silence, staring at the ceiling together, breathing unsteadily. At the end of it, and if they are honest with each other, the decision was made before they even started talking. Jon wants Martin to blind him, and Martin is going to do it.

They decided on bleach. Jon can’t talk about what Melanie did without going a little pale and looking like he might be sick, and Martin knows he won’t be able to follow through if blood is involved. He says that the thought of pushing a blade into Jon’s face makes his gut clench in agony. Poison will take too long and is unpredictable. They settle on a jug of concentrated bleach and an eyedropper—it will hurt, and it will take a little while, but Jon is increasingly afraid that if they don’t do it soon, he will miss his chance—Elias will make his move, and Jon will still be in his metaphysical grasp, and powerless to fight him. He can feel the weight of being watched, like two hands pressed down hard on his shoulders, like someone standing close behind him, their breath against the back of his neck.

In many ways the talk is entirely clinical. Clinical because it must be, because the emotions of it, the raw parts, will make it impossible. Logistics and Internet research. Eventually Martin will have to make this choice, too. It isn’t a question of _if._

It’s the question of _when,_ now. And the jug of bleach sits on the counter waiting for Jon to be ready.

* * *

He’s ready on Tuesday night, their third Tuesday in Scotland. Into the front room where Martin is curled up under a blanket in the armchair by the fire Jon brings the jug of bleach in his hands, which are shaking only slightly, and Martin looks at it, and looks at him, and exhales very slowly.

Jon crawls into bed by himself a few hours later, listening to the sounds of Martin in the kitchen, hot water boiling on the stove to sterilize the eyedropper they are going to use. He hears the refrigerator opening and closing, the sound of the window being pulled down and latched, the gas click on and off on the stove, and the long silence while the pot boils. He stares out at the dark empty hallway, greyish rectangle of space, picturing Martin standing alone on the linoleum floor in his bare feet, in the starlight through the window, watching the blue flame beneath the pot, listening to the roiling bubble. He considers getting out from under the covers and going in there to see him properly. He doesn’t—he knows it would only sharpen the ache in his heart.

Martin comes to bed a little while later, closing the bedroom door and climbing in behind him. Already Jon has grown so used to the very specific roll and shift of Martin’s weight on the mattress next to him. His soft close warmth. Martin reaches gently over Jon to turn off the lamp, and Jon catches his wrist in midair.

He turns over to face him, and Martin blinks at him, slowly. Without his glasses his eyes are somehow even bigger than usual, Jon thinks. Big, shining, kind. They search Jon’s face as if looking for some secret there.

He nestles closer, until their knees are bumping, and brings a hand up to Martin’s face, thumb skating just beneath his eye. He breathes a shaky breath, and Martin’s brows furrow just slightly.

“You okay?” he says softly.

Jon swallows. “Just looking,” he murmurs. 

* * *

In the morning, Martin gets up early. He makes more breakfast than either of them will ever be able to eat, eggs, bacon, pancakes, orange juice, coffee, toast. The jug of bleach and the sterilized eyedropper, laid out neatly on a tea towel to dry overnight, rest quiet and unassuming on the countertop while they sit at the wooden table to eat.

Jon does his best, though his stomach is turning and his heart is beating like a frantic hummingbird in his chest. The food tastes like nothing in his mouth. He feels bad about that, and it must show, because Martin reaches across the table to take his hand and squeezes it tight until he has finished his glass of orange juice.

He hasn’t slept; he has been bracing all night for the inevitable emotional collapse he expects Martin to have. He expects tears, pleas to change his mind now that it’s happening. But he is surprised at Martin’s calm. How soft and kind his face is. How quiet and collected he seems. Even in standing from the table to clear Jon’s half-empty plate he is steady and careful. His hands are not shaking like Jon’s are.

He sits in his chair with his hands squeezed between his knees until Martin has finished cleaning up, wiping down the counter, stacking dishes to soak in the sink. He should be watching more closely, he thinks, through the pounding of his heart in his throat. He should be memorizing every single minute motion of Martin’s body and the exact color of every part of him, and the way the bright morning sun is filtering through the dust motes floating in the air. He tries to concentrate, but he can’t. His eyes keep straying to the jug of bleach on the counter.

He is still staring when he feels Martin’s hands cup his face and tilt it up, and Martin’s lips press gently to his forehead.

“Why don’t you go lie down,” Martin says softly. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

In the front room Martin has already put a few pillows at one end of the sofa and a few blankets draped over the back. There’s a fire in the hearth. On the side table a pitcher of water, a washrag, a bottle of painkillers. Jon hadn’t even thought of that. Now that it’s happening he realizes how little he has thought about all of this. Past the gut-wrenching worry of being spied upon, possessed, manipulated, he hasn’t really thought about what this _means_. What it will feel like. How much it will hurt.

He sits down gingerly on the sofa, and then lies back. The pillows put his head at an uncomfortable angle; he pulls two of them and drops them onto the floor. Overhead the plaster ceiling, spiderwebbed with cracks and water stains. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He pulls one of the blankets off and over himself, if only to feel a little less exposed. He fists his hands in the fabric. In the corner of the room a clock is ticking.

He closes his eyes. Not the smartest thing, perhaps, given what is about to happen. He should be drinking in those cracks in the ceiling and committing them to the deepest parts of his memory. But he is glad they are closed when he hears the unmistakable sound of the jug being set down on the side table, the slosh of the liquid inside.

Martin gets an arm under him and eases him up— “Here,” he says, and when Jon comes back down he is lying with his head across Martin’s lap. Martin clears his throat quietly, and still Jon keeps his eyes closed. He hears the sound of the cap seal breaking. The fire crackling. Martin’s breathing very close and steady.

“Martin,” he says, and is mortified at the weakness of his voice, how it breaks in the middle.

Martin doesn’t say anything. He rests a hand on Jon’s forehead, warm and heavy, as if to ground him.

Jon reminds himself to breathe. This is going to take a while. A few drops in each eye won’t be nearly enough to destroy his vision completely. They will need to go slow—wait a few minutes for the bleach to absorb, for the pain to diminish, before going back for more. It could take hours. It could take the entire day. Neither of them want to take any chances on it not working, on not doing enough. Jon had asked—had made him promise—that they would not stop until the damage was irreversible. That they would go past that.

“Breathe,” Martin says softly, his hand moving gently through Jon’s hair, and Jon realizes he has not been breathing at all, even when he was thinking about it. The inhale he takes sounds like a sob. He tries to swallow it past the lump in his throat.

He opens his eyes then, before Martin can ask him to. He looks up at the face looking down at him. It’s a careful face, cautiously arranged, the tension only visible at the very corners of the eyes and mouth—soft eyes, soft smile.

“I wish I’d looked at you more,” Jon says. It sounds stupid and bumbling and too-little-too-late. He can’t cry now—it’ll flush the bleach from his eyes. He still feels tears prickling, threatening. “You know?”

He wants to reach up and touch Martin’s face, cradle it, bring it down close to see it in perfect detail, but his hands feel paralyzed where they’re clenched around the blanket.

“I don’t care about the rest of it, really,” he says, hoarsely. “But I wish I had looked at you longer.”

“It’s alright,” Martin says. There’s a raw awful catch in his voice but he doesn’t let it come through to his face. Martin clears his throat. He turns his head away. “I’m going to hold your eye open, okay?”

“Okay,” Jon says.

Martin’s fingertips are cool on his face. They pull—not too hard—on the skin above and below his right eye, so that he is staring upward toward Martin and the ceiling, to the cracks and stains wavering and swimming overhead. Martin. He stares, wild and desperately, at that lovely sweet face, its contours and bones, freckles and laugh-lines, lashes and lips and the soft curling hair that falls over his forehead, in the seconds he has left.

The first drop doesn’t hurt. The second does. The third hurts even more. Jon makes a small sound in his throat. Martin doesn’t pause—he moves to the left eye, pulling open the eyelids, one, two, three more drops in. Then he lets go, and Jon blinks rapidly, punching out a breath at the rancid sting, tears welling and rolling out from the corners of his eyes and down his face, down his temples into his hair. He can still see Martin, a little blurry now. Martin’s beautiful dark doe eyes, concerned behind his specs, looking down.

“More,” Jon says, his voice strangled.

“Already?”

“Yes,” Jon says. He opens his eyes as wide as he can though every part of his body is fighting to keep them closed. He does not move them even a fraction off of Martin. He feels a mounting panic that this is a mistake. It takes every muscle in him to keep his throat closed and keep the _no, stop, I changed my mind_ from climbing out of his mouth. He grits his teeth until pain shoots through his jaw. He’s going to look until he physically cannot look anymore.

Three more drops in each eye. Jon hisses in pain, squeezes them shut. His fingers come loose from the blanket and he covers his face with them, as if the dark behind them will lessen the sting, the burn—it doesn’t, and Martin gently pries them off again much too soon, sooner than Jon would have thought. They’d agreed on five minutes between. His heart is swelling to fill his entire throat.

“Jon,” Martin says, and past the rushing blood in his ears Jon can hear the very small crack in his voice. “Come on. A few more and then we can rest for a minute.”

Jon’s eyes do not want to open. Martin opens them for him. The soft light in the room is searing cold on the surfaces of them. He doesn’t give Jon time to brace himself—three more drops in each eye and that is the first time Jon makes a real noise, a little cry. His face is hot with the tears streaming down it.

Martin hushes him, setting aside the dropper. He lifts Jon’s head a little, and the damp washcloth feels coarse and rough on his flushed face, smearing away the tears and excess bleach. Jon breathes in gut-punch ins and outs, his eyelids screwed shut as tight as they can be.

Martin’s hand on the side of his face, cradling it. His lips on Jon’s forehead feel both cold and unbearably hot. “You’re doing really well, Jon,” Martin says, and Jon doesn’t need to see him to know he’s crying. He can hear it in his voice. “You’re doing so well.”

* * *

Jon lies on the sofa in Martin’s lap for hours. Every six drops are harder than the six drops before.

He feels numb, far away back in his skull. It’s as if someone is holding two hot coals directly against his eyelids, has pried them open and stuffed flaming embers inside. His brain is a roiling fog, his ears ringing, his fingers in paroxysms clinging to Martin’s jumper. Around noon, he really screams for the first time, a sobbing, wretched sound, and turns to bury his face into Martin’s lap, trying with all his will not to claw at his face with his shivering hands.

Martin lets him rest for longer and longer, but he does not stop. He doesn’t let Jon stop. His crying dries out into hollow purpose and he dutifully peels Jon’s eyes open, again and again, three more drops. In between while Jon shakes and clings to him he pulls him up and into his arms, hugging him tight against his body, rocking him, trembling hands stroking his hair, lips pressed to the crown of his head.

_You’re doing so well, Jon._ When that dries up, _I love you. You’re okay._

By two in the afternoon Jon’s eyes are so inflamed that his lids refuse to open even when Martin tries to pull them apart. Through the sliver of white he manages to expose, Jon cannot see anything but a painful shear of light that makes him moan. He cannot see Martin anymore above him even though he knows he is there and more than anything that feels like someone has twisted something sharp into his gut.

Three more drops to those slivers of eye. His face feels taut with dried tears even when Martin bathes them away.

“Almost there,” Martin says, his voice hoarse, and Jon knows he’s lying. That shear of light means they aren’t nearly finished.

Jon rests for an hour at four o’clock, breathing hard, curled as tightly and as small as he can be in Martin’s arms, and Martin smoothes a hand up and down his back. Jon’s burning face is tucked into the crook of Martin’s neck. _I love you,_ Martin murmurs, over and over, like a prayer. _I’m so proud of you. I’m so proud of you,_ he says, his voice exhausted with crying, _you’ve been so brave._

The very small part of his mind that is not a haze knows that he will regret this when it is over. The freedom, no—but it is hard to think of Elias and all-seeing powers when his pain is wracking his body, when he is half-coming apart in Martin’s arms.

He doesn’t care about missing sunrises and sunsets or spring flowers or Christmas lights. He doesn’t care that he will never read an old book or watch a movie or admire a piece of art ever again. He doesn’t care about what it will be like to learn maneuver the new dark world, how he will have to learn to exist again after it. He couldn’t care less about any of that. In the fearful anticipation of this act, in the racing thoughts and difficult conversations, he hasn’t let himself think about this, not really. Now it is all he can think about, underneath the pain. He will regret so deeply not having really, really looked at Martin while he had the chance. He will regret not having seen every single possible smile and every single glitter in his eyes, and every single expression of joy and love and excitement. He will regret not having paid attention all this time, and every moment on the journey north that he wasn’t looking. These weeks were not enough. Nothing might ever have been enough. He crushes himself closer, wrapping his arms around Martin’s neck, clinging so tightly he could break bone.

Martin calls it, finally, at seven—when Jon is in too much pain to move, let alone cry out, when his head is lolling on Martin’s lap and the hurt is so intense that it may as well be nothing anymore.

When Martin gently pries his eyelids apart again, and asks what Jon can see, he shakes his head.

* * *

In the bathroom, hunched over the sink, Martin wipes down Jon’s face and throat, holding him up under the armpits. Jon’s knees feel weak, his ankles turned inward. If Martin were to let him go, he thinks he would crumple to the floor and never move again.

He wraps soft gauze around Jon’s head, guides him to the bedroom.

He doesn’t get out of bed again until Friday. They don’t speak much—whenever they do their voices crack and they fall silent again. On Thursday, Martin sits up in bed with him and reads him a few old statements filched from the Institute, his voice low and steady, just enough to calm Jon’s heart and slow his racing thoughts. He asks, now and then, if Jon feels any different, but they both know there will be no way of telling until Jon opens his eyes again, and he is terrified to do it.

Jon feels as if someone has cracked apart his chest and scooped all of his insides out. He has never been so tired in his life. Martin is exhausted, too—he lies next to Jon for hours in the morning until he absolutely cannot lie there anymore, and goes into the kitchen to fix something for them.

The pain is gone, now—aloe on the skin around his eyes has calmed it. Martin assures him that it worked. When he tells Jon how much of the bleach they used his voice grows thin and horrified, and later Jon listens to him crying in the bathroom. He changes the gauze around Jon’s eyes once or twice a day, and on Friday, when it comes off and Jon feels the air on his face and realizes that Martin is sitting quietly beside him, not moving to cover them again, he takes a deep, shaking breath.

It’s a fight to part the lids. His body has almost forgotten how to, after two days closed so tight. He feels them come apart sticky and sore, and when they are open, he hears Martin breathe in, but he doesn’t see him do it.

He doesn’t see anything.

He makes a sound—maybe it’s a laugh. Just as likely it’s a sob. He reaches out and Martin is there, pulling him into his arms, squeezing him tight, and Jon squeezes back, digging his fingers into Martin’s shoulders, his face buried in Martin’s neck.

“Thank you,” he breathes, “thank you, thank you—”

It isn’t until much later, that night, spooned up against Martin’s warm sleeping body, that Jon realizes he doesn’t feel watched anymore at all.

* * *

“How do you feel?” Martin asks him, on Saturday. They are sitting in the front room, curled up on the sofa near one another, mugs of tea in their hands.

Jon considers for a while before he answers. He is still so tired, his body sapped of its energy; the cynical scared part of him is waiting to feel the watchful weight pressing down on his shoulders any minute, or for Beholding to heal his ruined eyes, for his vision to return in an awful instant. He is still keeping them closed, most of the time. He feels safer that way.

But so far there has been no weight. No change in the nothingness he stares out at. Every hour that passes is another hour in which they’ve won. He can scarcely believe it.

“It’s just a shame,” he says eventually, and trails off. He curls his hand anxiously in and out of the handle of his mug, and feels Martin, his index finger stroking along the inside of Jon’s wrist, soothing.

Martin leans his head on his shoulder and is quiet.

“I miss seeing you already,” Jon says softly.

“Small price to pay,” says Martin.

“Not small to me.”

Martin, without saying anything, burrows closer.

He lets Jon touch his face for hours later, lying close to him in bed. Very patient, very calm. He closes his eyes when Jon’s fingers run over them and Jon feels their trembling behind the lids, his long delicate lashes. He feels the heat of Martin’s breath from between his soft lips, the Cupid’s bow divot above them. He traces his fingers down Martin’s nose and along the sockets of bone around his eyes, through his brows, feels the cool shells of Martin’s ears, the warm pliant place where his face meets his throat. Martin smiles and he feels it, his mouth broadening, his cheeks lifting, the skin near his eyes folding. When a tear slips from Martin’s eye it runs along his finger, hot, and he feels that too.

“Thank you,” Jon whispers, “Martin,” again, again, again.

* * *

Martin throws out the jug of bleach the next day. When it’s his turn, he says, he thinks he’ll go with something sharp, after all.

He tells Jon that his new eyes are beautiful. Like ice, he says.

When he is out on his walks, or down to the shops for groceries, he leaves Jon sitting in the armchair near the window, wrapped in a quilt, where the autumn sun can warm his face, and he can better hear the sheep bleating in the field outside. His feet tucked up under him, his head leaning against the glass. He can sit in complete silence, _alone_ —there is no other presence in the room, observing him. His head feels clear and light. He had not realized how oppressive it has been, for so long, until the oppressiveness was stripped away. Soon, Martin says, they’ll go for a walk together. Really let Jon get his sea legs. Fresh air and countryside sounds. It’s the loveliest thing Jon can imagine.

Sitting at the window, he can hear the noise of the gravel when Martin comes up the hill with his paper bags or back from the farm down the way. When he comes in and tucks himself neatly between Jon’s body and the chair’s arm and kisses the hinge of Jon’s jaw and tells him all about it, Jon can reach up to feel his face with his hands, feel his smile underneath them, press their foreheads together, feel the pulse in Martin’s throat, and breathe. _And there is nothing else besides this_ —no one coming after them, no one watching through Jon’s eyes, no compelling voice drawing him back to London. No more gnawing insatiable hunger for fearful things. Only Scotland and the safe house and Martin, Martin, so close to him, so beautiful under his hands, so full to overflowing with love. He can scarcely believe it. How lucky he is.

And how happy. After everything, how happy.

“The sky was blue today,” says Martin, resting his head on Jon’s shoulder. “Picture this—”


End file.
